One of the early victims of the JFK conspiracy of silence, better yet "silencing" in the
aftermath of JFK'S murder, was the noted reporter, columnist and television celebrity, Dorothy Kilgallen. I had watched her for years on "What's My Line?", not realizing that she had any involvement with the JFK story. Years later, I learned that she had broken the convention of silence in the press and written openly in her column about discrepancies in the official story. Suddenly she was dead.

On November 8, 1965, Dorothy Kilgallen, was found dead in her apartment shortly after returning from Dallas where she had interviewed Jack Ruby and had conducted her own investigation of the JFK murder during several trips to cover the Ruby trial.

She had revealed secret transcripts of Ruby's testimony in her column. Kilgallen had met with Ruby. She had learned of a meeting three weeks before the assassination at Ruby's "Carousel", the Dallas underworld's merry-go-round where the "Big D" mobsters wheeled around.

Present at the meeting were Ruby, Officer J.D. Tippit, Bernard Weismann and, she would later learn, a fourth party.

Lee Israel, author of "Kilgallen", reports that that Ruby, himself a TV fan of Dorothy Kilgallen, had taken a liking to her during the trial. According to Israel, he respected her more than any other reporter. She had gained his confidence and had several conversations with him in the courtroom. She was given a five minute session alone with Ruby. Some writers have stretched this to a half-hour, others deny it.

Regardless, it is a fact that when Dorothy returned to New York, she told friends that she had discovered that Ruby and the slain Officer J.D. Tippit had been friends. They had been seen together in Ruby's Carousel Club at a meeting 2 weeks before the assassination in the company of Bernard Weissman, who had placed the "JFK-Wanted for Treason" newspaper ad in Dallas newspapers on November 22nd, 1963. Studying the Warren Commission Report, Killgallen deduced that the meeting had also been reported to Chief Justice Warren AND that the identity of "the fourth man",which she had been unable to ascertain, had been reported to Warren as "a rich Texas oil man", as Earl Warren described him in the official transcript.

She told Israel that she had discovered something that was going to break the whole JFK assassination mystery wide open. She told the same story to her next door neighbor, her hairdresser, her agent, her publisher, and the producer and host of "Nightlife".

Kilgallen had told Israel about a very mysterious and sinister player in the JFK assassination to whom she gave the code name "ferret man". From the description of the individual, it is clear that "ferret man" was none other than David Ferrie, another known associate of Jack Ruby involved in gun running, the Marcello mob and other anti-Castro operations from Florida to Texas. At one time, Ruby and Ferrie were co-owners of an airplane.

Nightlife's producer, Nick Vanoff, pleaded with her not to broach the subject on the air. She had arrived at the studio with a folder full of pertinent and explosive notes documents. She kept the folder closed throughout the interview. Vanoff, asked her agent, Bob Bach, to send her "a dozen long-stemmed roses."

On Sunday November 8, Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead, sitting fully dressed, upright in bed, early in the morning. The New York City Police investigated and the coroner found that Dorothy Kilgallen had died from ingestion of a lethal combination of alchohol and barbituates. All her notes and the article on which she had been working to "blow the JFK assassination wide open" also disappeared.

What did Kilgallen know? The convention of silence continued. The New York Times noted the coroner's report. The Daily News noted it as well. Of course, the Journal American took note but nowhere did you read any reference to her Dallas trips nor her investigation into the murder of JFK at the high point of her own career. Every nostalgic memory of her in the Press was a fond one of "What's My Line?".

They all abandoned her, no one asked a question publicly. Not John Daly, not Bennett Cerf. No one in the press could be bothered about someone, even someone famous, who had died nearly by her own hand. Indeterminate causes can mean many things and "causes" is plural.

It was only the year before the murder of JFK that no one had questioned the death of Marilyn Monroe on the other side of the continent, who had also died of a barbiturate overdose, by her own hand. Neither her diary, nor ................

Good story, especially regarding your observation that Kilgallen was abandoned by here peers in the face of a suspicous death. Unfortunately, she was not the only one.

I always marveled at how many of Kennedy's friends and confidants (Sorenson, Schlessinger,et al.), who profited so handsomely from their personal and political relationships with him during his administration so completely abandoned him and did not raise a flicker of protest regarding the suspicious circumstances of his assassination. After his death, they rushed to get out their own individual books in print and up for sale, but largely said nothing about the circumstances of his murder and the efforts to obstruct any any meaningful investigation of it .